Barone announced Haunted Chocolatier back in 2021, but amid ongoing work on his phenomenally successful Stardew Valley, progress on the follow-up has been slow going. Indeed, in June, Barone admitted to feeling somewhat embarrassed to have to keep on saying he was still working away on the game. “Feels kinda dumb posting this same thing over and over, but that’s the reality,” he said at the time.
In a new interview with GQ (thanks, Eurogamer), Barone touched on what to expect from Haunted Chocolatier when it eventually comes out, and it sounds more different from Stardew Valley than I had expected. It’s set in a more “metaphysical” locale, for a start, and in terms of gameplay it’s more of an action RPG.
“It is still what I call a town game,” Barone said, “But it’s more of an action RPG — the main focus is more about adventuring, finding equipment and getting more powerful. There are monsters, there are boss fights. It’s for the people in Stardew Valley that go into the mines. That’s what I do, honestly.”
The game will eventually be released, but in the meanwhile, I’m pretty sure he will release a few more Stardew Valley updates, because he just can’t leave that game alone.
Not that I am angry, if anything, I find it funny; because he is working on this game but every now and then, he’ll come “Hey, so… I know I said Stardew was done but…” and drops another absurdly big update nobody asked for that makes you go “I know I said I finished playing Stardew but… one more run!”.
I wish some AAA games had half the post-launch support Stardew has…
It’s a lot easier I think, to be one person working on two games that are both passion projects, than to be a large studio working to support a multi-faceted project where the work is distributed across several departments and teams. In that environment, there’s no single person who knows the full ins and outs of the game, so when that post-launch skeleton crew gets to squashing bugs and adding features, they’ve already lost most of the knowledge required to do more unless that post-launch support was intended from the start.
ConcernedApe is also a crazy exception, even for indies. Most games of that scale do depend on at least a few different people, but the guy is a savant for game dev. Stardew being a solo project is absurd.
Stardew stopped being a solo project two or three patches ago. ConcernedApe brought in a few more people to help with updates around the time the new game was announced.
Still massively impressive what he did get done on his own, so I’m really just being pedantic.